Open Water (36 page)

Rennie tried to rouse him. “Are you flying or dying?” she said. “Who’s baby-sitting who?”

He leaned up on his elbow. He shook his head like a dog with a gnat in its ear. He felt everything sifting. “Shit. Wait. I’m getting you out of here. Hold on a minute.”

A nurse came into the room. “What have we got here?” Her voice was amicable.

“My son. Caught in the rain.”

“Your son? Hey, I thought you had only one son.”

“Two,” Rennie said. She tried to clear her throat to explain, but she couldn’t get her breath behind her words. Her trachea rattled and sputtered.

Willis sat up on the edge of the bed.

The nurse looked back and forth between them. “So this is your other son? Well, you’ve got the
same eyes
,” the nurse said.

“I hope he sees a different picture than I do.” Rennie croaked the difficult multiword sentence, leaving wide spaces.

“Now, Miss Hopkins. I don’t want to hear you give up,” the nurse said as she walked out of the room.

Willis sensed that the nurse was going to announce him to the world. He wiped his face with the palm of his hand and lowered himself off the thousand-dollar bed. He told Rennie, “It’s raining out there, so you’re going to get wet.”

Rennie was grinning through her plastic mustache.

Willis said, “Can you breathe without this?”

She nodded.

“Are you sure? You better be sure.” He unthreaded the oxygen leader from where it was hooked around her ears and lifted it over her head. He yanked the IV needle from the back of her hand, the tube came free, but its needle stayed inserted in the vein where it was taped. He left it in for now. He took Rennie in his arms and collected her blanket, but the blanket was too clumsy and he let it drop.

“Don’t forget my book,” she said.

He saw the tiny suede square on the table arm and he stuffed it in his back pocket. Two women appeared at the door to block his exit. He shifted Rennie in his arms so her feet wouldn’t knock the door frame and he kept walking. He made his apologies to the stunned medics. They followed their training—or they had an instinct—and didn’t
try to stop him. He saw a row of motorized carts, Little Rascals there for the taking, but he decided against swiping one. He marched down the hall through the ambient lighting. He navigated the double swinging doors, kicking each panel wide and rotating through, Rennie in his arms, in a smooth, choreographed moment as steady and fluid as Balanchine.

Rennie hardly weighed anything, but it was awkward walking in the dark, over the slippery manicured lawns. He searched through the impenetrable curtain of rain for the bike, but someone had moved it. He decided to go on foot the half-mile to the college, where he hoped Debbie had cribbed a car.

At first, Rennie tried to hold on, looping her arms around his neck, but it was too much effort for her and she let her arms fall. He stumbled through thick clumps of clover and fell to his knees, but he didn’t release his cargo. Rennie bossed him, “One foot in front of the other.”

Willis was parallel the great sloping lawns of The Breakers mansion when the security personnel came up behind him. They scrolled a floodlight against his back. His alarming shadow rose up in front of him. He saw an exaggerated image with extra appendages. A towering man-insect. A stiltlike human form carrying its broken human likeness. Willis looked over his shoulder once. Two men were riding an electric cart. Willis didn’t stop walking. The driver came alongside Willis and told him to release the patient.

Willis began to trot along the Cliff Walk. The men were cautious and tracked Willis at his own jogging pace. The next thing, Willis darted off the path, tumbled over a low fence of privet and beach roses. He was running across The
Breakers’ wide lawn. Rennie’s nightgown snagged the rose thorns and he jerked it loose. The men couldn’t drive the cart after him; they wheeled around, heading for the mansion’s street entrance.

Even in the rain, Willis could hear the musical switch-backs of a piano sonata. He climbed the marble steps that led to the first-floor terrace. Beyond the wide terrace he saw the crowded hall, rows of perfectly coiffed heads; a woman wore a heavy necklace like a diamond-studded garden claw across her daring neckline. All the men wore monkey suits. The sea of faces was tilted at an angle, chins set, eyes peeled on the stage, where a page turner and a pianist worked together. Willis listened to the Steinway throbbing above the percussive rain. He found a side entrance to the building and brushed by a startled female usher who stood at the final row of velvet chairs.

Willis had walked into the Great Hall, the central ballroom of the famous turn-of-the-century mansion. The large room was dominated by a sweeping double staircase, Palladian colonnades, and chandeliers the size of inverted treetop canopies. It was two stories high with a fantastic trompe l’oeil ceiling of blue sky and cotton wool clouds.

Everyone in the audience displayed their commitment to social elegance and avoided craning their necks around at the sudden intrusion. Willis saw an empty chair and plopped down, twisting Rennie face front. He looked at the ceiling mural, its fantastic blue heaven. The fair weather up there seemed like an ingenious invention to counter the usual Newport scud. He threw his head back to admire it; his profile was startlingly pale, his skin white as an ice sculpture. Yet he looked resolved, peaceful beneath that one-hundred-year-old sky.

Rennie was half-conscious and she complained when
he shifted her weight to his other knee. She settled against his shoulder. People could no longer help themselves and started to twist around in their chairs to stare at him. He picked up a program from the empty seat beside his own. He began to read the list of “Twenty-four Preludes, Op. 28, by Frédéric François Chopin.”

Then Rennie started coughing.

Ushers appeared and stalked the rows. Willis was pulled to his feet by two alarmingly beefy young men hired for that specific purpose. Willis reorganized Rennie in his arms and walked with the young ushers to the street door. There he saw the Château-sur-Mer security officers in a line, their aerosol deterrents strapped prominently to their belts. Willis turned around again and ran across the oriental rugs, tripping on unpredictable humps. He carried Rennie to the opposite end of the huge mansion. The music stopped abruptly, the pianist put her hands in her lap and stared across the hall. Voices surged in a roar of indignation. People shouted after Willis as if Willis had burgled their personal possessions, as if these recreational minutes were priceless. Willis exited through the French doors on the north side, which had been left ajar so that the big fireplace in the Great Hall could have better draw.

Pounding down the slope, his trunk tumbled ahead of his legs and he fell. Rennie spilled out of his arms. He picked her up, collecting her skewed limbs and arranging her nightgown. He didn’t think he could carry her for very much longer. He ran as far as he could before coming upon
a chain-link fence at the perimeter of the property. It almost took the heart out of him. He trotted its length until he found a gap where a twenty-foot privet hedge merged with a galvanized metal fence pole.

The security men were in the street around him and he tucked behind a car. The electric cart purred up and down the length of the block. Willis crouched behind the fender of a luxury automobile. He waited. The hem of Rennie’s nightgown swirled open in a puddle. When the cart moved one street over, he inched his way back to the library at Salve Regina College. Debbie was waiting in a Ford Taurus. She had taken the time to adjust the climate control and the car’s interior was steaming.

He huddled Rennie into the backseat and pushed her over on the upholstery. He sank below the window ledge so he wouldn’t be seen. “Drive!” he told Debbie.

“Who are you shouting at! Shit. You want to go to your house?”

“No,” he said, “not the house.” He couldn’t take Rennie home again. He was taking her to a “transfer station.” He imagined all the soulless places where the dead are temporarily deposited. The refrigerated morgues, the unsuspecting Dumpsters, the countryside crematoriums like the one at White’s Monument Village. Who manufactures these secret kilns? He was seized by a cold hysteria. His lungs ached after his physical exertion. A wild loneliness stirred through his chest cavity, all the pink airways and tender alveoli caught in a speechless throbbing.

H
olly looked down the row of cottages at Neptune’s Hide-A-Way. Choosing the right one for Rennie was almost too great a responsibility for her. She decided on Verbena, the second to the last shack. Two of its windows had been left unboarded and she knew Rennie would be grateful for the natural light. Holly had turned on the circuit breaker in the office, and she was relieved to see the light come on when she walked into the cottage and flicked the wall switch. She had more difficulty figuring out the right connection to get cold water in the shack; she had to tighten all the bleeders before she opened the shut-off valve and the water whined into the pipes. Even with most of the windows boarded up, the gusts of wind stirred through, fingering the curtain hems. The gas stove was the only source of heat and she lit the oven.

She was in the shack for only ten minutes when she smelled something funny drifting up from the stove. A nest of mice had ignited on the broiler pan where they had organized their winter home. She found a potholder and took the pan with the burning nest outside where she rinsed it in the rain. The charred rodent-stench remained, and she left the pan on the stoop.

She didn’t let the incident upset her and she prepared the cottage for Willis and Rennie. She studied the shelves along one wall of the kitchen—the reassuring cabbage roses on the shelf paper, roses the size of soup plates. She ran her hand over the roses, then went about making up a bed for Rennie.

She heard a car turn in the drive. She saw a strange girl was driving. Willis was in the backseat. The girl helped Willis lift Rennie out of the car; Rennie looked like a scarecrow. Her head fell back on the crook of Willis’s arm, her white hair looked wet and ropy. Holly met them at the door of the cottage.

“Welcome to Verbena,” she said, her pride was showing. She loved these shacks and couldn’t hide it. She looked back and forth between Rennie and the interesting stranger, but Rennie caught her attention. Rennie looked half alive in Willis’s arms. Her other half looked irretrievably gone. Willis didn’t look much better.

“This is Debbie,” Willis said.

“Oh, sure. Debbie.” Holly recognized the name and nodded at the young girl. Debbie was the love interest who had come and gone before her.

Willis arranged Rennie’s weight in his arms. He was looking for a place to put her down. Holly shook off her jealous twinge and led Willis into the little bedroom where she had made the bed and left the blanket turned down. The sheets were icy.

“Wait,” Holly said. “Someone should warm up the bed.”

Willis was soaking wet.

The two women looked at each other.

“Let’s both of us do it,” Holly said.

Debbie looked startled at the strange request. “Well, I guess it’s all right.”

Debbie and Holly got under the covers. They each felt shy and kept apart; then they saw that their reserve wasn’t going to warm the sheets, so they scissored their arms and legs as if they were making snow angels. Holly felt the cold sheets respond to their exercise with each swipe. They started to giggle.

Willis lost patience.

“Just a few more minutes to heat this up,” Holly said. Once and again, her ankle brushed Debbie’s and they both recoiled from the contact. They pedaled their legs under the covers and again collided.

Willis sat down in a chair, Rennie on his knee. “This is ridiculous,” he said. “We have to get a heater in here.”

Holly said, “I saw an electric heater at Nicole’s. I can go get it.”